It's unseasonably mild here in most of the Arkanshire, with showers expected today, then a cold blast on Sunday that should drop temps around here to about 20 F Monday morning.
If we ever get out into the stars for real the way we did in "Trek", a good name for an Earthlike planet with bizarre weather would be "New Arkansas". 
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If I may go off topic:
The legendary radio program "Beaker Street", still hosted by Clyde Clifford, can be heard Sundays 7PM-midnight on The Point 94.1 (KKPT) out of Little Rock, or online via the Point's website http://www.point941.com or http://www.beakerstreet.com. The latter site also contains past playlists for Beaker St., which will give you some idea on whether or not you want to listen to the show. 
Was SUNNY today, no wind, and a balmy 38 or so degress This after snow snow wind cold. But, I got a new best friend! Red Truck Rick the snow plow driver. Yessir! Says we're in for more Tuesday or Monday or sumpthin'.... fine with me. I got a crush *blush*
Here's just after round 1, with round 2 gathering in the distance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1...h?
v=1_Wrq2AUA58
That bus thing is crazy! :-O :-O
Plugging radio shows, eh? Okay... 6-10am Saturday morning....
http://www.myradioplace.com/
am60...m600SatFolk.htm
The storms that hit us are heading east. Git yer snow shovel at the ready folks
Foggy this morning (dense in spots), but the forecast is for sunny weather and a high of 80. It's been the same forecast for several days now, but will get a little chilly (lows in the 40s) early next wekk.
Having gone to the UW and lived in Seattle for 10 years I can say that when those streets get icy it is about as bad as anywhere in the US. Mainly due to the steepness. The west hills of Portland get bad too, but the hilly parts of Portland are a much smaller percentage of the city than in Seattle. Juneau is the only place I've lived with worse icy steep streets in winter.
I remember watching an idiot frat boy turn a white SUV down an icy NE 54th St from Ravenna towards U-Village, which is a VERY steep drop. He weaved around the "street closed" cones that the city had set up, hit the ice, and then slid sideways at high speed until crashing into the parked cars at the bottom of the hill, demolishing the side of his SUV.
People don't get that SUVs are actually worse on ice than ordinary small cars due to their weight.
As for AAA and the cost of changing a tire. $100 doesn't sound extraordinarily bad. If you don't have AAA you can often get quick roadside service faster for small things like a dead battery or flat tire by calling a taxi. Most cabs will jump-start your car for a reasonable fee and I suspect a lot of cabbies would change your tire for less than $100.
Since you live in Seattle there is a better option you should look into. Check into getting your auto insurance through Costco. They use Ameriprise which turned out to be $200 cheaper/year for me to insure my car and my wife's than GEICO which I had previously. And it comes with free roadside assistance included. Well worth the price of a Costco membership. I think you can get price quotes online through the Costco web site.
6" or more of snow on the ground here in northern NJ, with more expected today. We bought a Toro electric (corded) snow thrower shovel, which makes fairly quick work of most of it. $89 bucks at Target and worth every penny.
I realized while driving to work on the NJ highways on Thursday, anticipating this storm, just how flimsy the guardrails on the exit/entrance overpasses by the Garden State Parkway are. A good skid could send a person into the Passaic River. And that's if you don't get killed by ice flying off the back of some asshole's SUV because he was too fucking lazy to clean it off.
clear, slightly chilly (51° this morning), still, and quiet.
beautiful southern california morning.
a week's supply of non-perishable food is a very prudent thing to have on hand.
hunker down, keep warm. tell kyle "yah-ah-teh" from me.
PDX
Light snow w/about 2 inches on the ground so far. 28 degrees, no wind to speak of so far. A soft quiet world. Gonna learn an old Gordon Lightfoot song, Steel rail blues, today.
Today it may get up to 80 in Austin. Three times in the past ten days it's gone from freezing at night (one night down to 2 to 70s during the day. Plus, we're in what's called an "extraordinary" drought, so virtually no precipitation with all this. My sinuses don't know what to do.
But all in all, nothing to complain about. No hurricanes, no blizzards, no mudslides.
Makes me wonder, though, how Ginny, Myra and the clan are doing on Roy Street.
Dateline Toronto ---> 6" to 1' of snow across the region last night. Another storm of similar magnitude tonight - with lake effect storms happening near Lakes Erie and Huron. Currently there are a few warnings issued by Environment Canada - Snowfall, Wind, Blowing Snow & Snowsquall. Forecasts with the windchill will have the temperature around -27C (-15F).
Traffic was a mess here yesterday - 300 flight cancellations, cancelled commuter trains, delayed long distance trains, a 20+ multi-car pileup north of the city, & glass panels falling 30 stories from a new office tower being built downtown disrupting downtown driving. Traffic of a different sort was also a mess - so many people were checking the Toronto Airport website for their flight status that the site crashed.
I fly on Christmas Eve - small snowfall forecast for that day...so we'll see if I depart and arrive on the scheduled ETA, or how long the queue is at the deicing pad.
I'll have to look again at the outside barriers on the Hogg's Hollow Bridge on Toronto's 401 highway - carrying 14 lanes of traffic and approx 400,000 vehicles per day. Wiki says the median is a reinforced Ontario Tall Wall (like a Jersey (concrete) Barrier but taller) - the satellite shot of it in Google Maps looks like it. Otherwise it's a long fall into the Don River Valley.
Stay warm wherever you all are.
South Central Indiana -- righteous deep-freeze just two days ago with freezing drizzle (no snow) glazing everything. Then, a confusing rise to upper 50s yesterday with rain. More chilly today and we may be back to the Christmas freezer tomorrow.
I was a Seattlite for 20 years until 2007 - so yeah, I hear you about the corruption, sweetened with infuriating "green" hype-syrup.
I have a vivid memory of a reticulated (two-sectioned, with a flexible middle) Metro bus jackknifed on the corner of Mercer Street and Queen Anne Avenue just after a blizzard.
Made the historic Counterbalance Cable Car system seem awfully sensible.
Low 30's in Cincinnati. Yesterday we had temperatures close to 60. Tonight we're supposed to go into "deep freeze" mode, i.e., wind chill factor will send temps into sub zero range. Our temps have been lower than average these past two months. I hate driving in snow and ice. Cincy is very hilly and I live at the top of a very steep hill. I spent 4 years in Portland at the University of Portland, and it snowed twice when I was there (back in the 60's/early 70's). Interesting take on Seattle. Poohbahs in Cincy always think Seattle and Portland are some kind of meccas. Jesse, I'm glad you're OK. Take care of yourself.
Snohomish County, 20 miles north of Downtown Seattle.
IMHO, assholes who practice their bullying tactics by tailgating in this sort of weather ought to forfeit their driver's license. One offense and they can bloody well get used to public transportation. Same drill as for DUI.
I'm indoors for the remainder of the weekend.
I managed to get up the connecting road to my house's side street first time. Which surprised me. Last Saturday, it took 15 minutes and 8 attempts to negotiate about 50 yards of 5° slope. And I'm not driving a Ford Excretion, I'm driving my Prius.
I was even more amazed when I managed to get my car up my 25 foot driveway and into the garage. First try. That's about a 10° slope, and it's been iced over since Tuesday. It took at least 6 attempts just last night.
So I'm not tempting fate any further than I have already.
BTW, if the NWS is to be believed, this is the longest stretch of subfreezing weather Metro Seattle has had to contend with since 1990.
Here's a browser hack for people who want to squeeze that last little bit of goodness out of the NWS website. They interpolate their weather forecasts, so you can get data down to a two mile patch around your own residence.
1. Get the latitude and longitude, down to as many significant figures as you can. You can squeeze five places worth of decimal fraction out of Google maps, which is plenty.
2. Once you have this, start at http://www.weather.gov/. Then zero in until you have your approximate region.
3. Once you see the small red square in the Google map on the upper right hand side of the page, the URL will have changed. The new one will have fields for the latitude and longitude.
4. Then, just plug your own latitude and longitude. Copy the URL out into a text editor and just overwrite latitude and longitude with your own. Then paste the result into your browser. Bingo.
5. Once you have the URL and can see your own area's forecast, bookmark it.
Thanks Stormcrow
Stormcrow: You can squeeze five places worth of decimal fraction out of Google maps, which is plenty.
And then some! Five places of decimal degrees is a precision of approximately 1 meter in latitude; somewhat less in longitude.
Anyhow, I'm in Edmonds, and getting a kick out of the 'OMG SNOWPOCOLYPSE!!!!111!!!!!' responses of everyone in town. Biggest problem is the fact that King County has around 100 snowplows *TOTAL*... so snow clearance, sanding, and salting are basically non-existent even on major thoroughfares (like say, I-5) at this point. Driving down I-5 at 11pm with no visible lane markers was trippy.
Biggest irritation was discovering that my chain set was missing a small but critical component fifteen minutes after every store in Seattle sold out of tire chains in my size. Still, several bags of sand in the bed of my Toyota 4x4 made the traction good enough to get around in relative safety. Haven't tempted fate on any of the steep hills, tho.
Stay safe y'all.
Light rain and 48 degrees in my neck of the bay area, rain for most of the week, highs in the 50s.
Five places of decimal degrees is a precision of approximately 1 meter in latitude; somewhat less in longitude.
Yes! LOL.
But I did it anyway. I remember thinking how to get the top of my house (I was using the satellite images) best centered in the map!
The NWS granularity, here in Snohomish County, is a grid with squares about two miles on a side. So five decimal places is really overkill for a job like this.
Another procedure is simply to dial in the NWS map data until you see that red square overlayed on the Google map, and then get "best fit". I conjecture that the NWS uses an arbitrary precomputed grid. If I'm right about that, then you cannot choose an arbitrary center point. You have to use whatever grid square "comes closest".
Yeah, it ought to be a clear choice. Unless your house, like mine, is almost right smack on the boundary between two adjacent grid squares.
I despise you all....hwey if i kill some oen do I get to go to the fiery pits of hell???
It hasn't gotten above -4 in three days...
the warmeist it got was last friday, 30 degrees for out freezing rain storm.
-4, -20 with the wind....
I hate the cold.
we don't even have any snow on the gorund to amke up for the fact that it is ungodly cold outside...
stupid weaterh...we are supposed to be in the middle of our december warm up happens every year). it shouldn't get this cold till jan/febuary.
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